The silence that follows my question is the loudest thing I've ever heard. It fills Spencer's office like something with mass, pressing against the windows, the walls, the three men each finding somewhere to look that isn't my face.
Miles breaks first. "It was—we weren't thinking clearly, the heat of the moment—"
"Not the moment." My voice cuts through his sentence. "The specific assurance. I asked if it was safe, and someone in that room told me it was handled."
His mouth closes. His hands curl into fists at his sides, then release—a cycle of tension with nowhere to land.
"I need a yes or no." I look at each of them in turn, giving the question enough space to fill every corner. "Were you actually using protection?"
Miles opens his mouth, starts to say he thought—and stops. Whatever he thought, the result is sitting across from him measuring approximately the size of a lime and asking questions with its mother's voice.
Blake is the one who says it plainly. "No. We weren't." Flat, undecorated, the truth without a cushion underneath it.
Spencer confirms with a nod that costs him something visible—his jaw tightens until bone presses white through skin and his eyes shift a shade toward silver. He doesn't add words because Spencer Wallace knows when language is a liability.
The confirmation locks into my chest like a door closing from the inside—a quiet, final sound, the kind that doesn't echo because the room it seals is too small for reverb. I press my palms against my knees and let the silence do what screaming would only dilute.
"Why?" One word, aimed at all three. "Why tell me it was safe when it wasn't?"
Blake answers because Blake answers the hard things, and because the other two are still learning how to breathe in this room.
"We knew our combined pheromones would likely trigger a dormant heat." Each word lands like sworn testimony. "The heat would make conception near-certain."
"And you chose not to tell me." I finish his sentence, and the sound of it in my own voice is worse than hearing it in his.
"I wanted you." Miles, stripped to the wire, unable to meet my eyes. His voice sounds like something held together with tape and refusal.
"The wanting made me stupid." He swallows and the sound is audible from across the room. "I'm not offering that as an excuse because there isn't one."
"Spencer." I turn to the window where he hasn't moved. "Your turn."
"I weighed your autonomy against my desire, and my desire won." Low, measured, every word placed by a man who has cross-examined himself and found the verdict unforgivable. "I have no justification you should accept."
The honesty sharpens the betrayal instead of softening it—gives it edges I feel cutting inside my ribs with every breath. Three brilliant, powerful men who know exactly what informed consent means, standing in an office worth more than my mother's house.
They made a collective decision about my body without my knowledge. Dressed it in reassurance, handed it to me wrapped in trust, and let me believe I was choosing when I was choosing nothing at all.
"You took the decision away from me." My voice doesn't rise—it goes flat, industrial, the tone of a woman who has been lied to by every powerful person in her life and is running out of surprise. "All three of you, with my body."
"Bailee, please—" Miles steps forward and I hold up one hand without looking at him, because looking at Miles right now would cost me the composure I'm spending everything to maintain.
"You knew what would happen and let me think I was choosing." My throat is dry but my voice holds every ounce of its weight. "That's not a mistake. That's a strategy."
Nobody argues, and the silence that follows is its own kind of confession. I file it alongside every other truth this room has produced today—right next to the ones I'm still excavating from underneath my sternum.
"Have you been seeing a doctor?" Spencer, redirecting with the focused intensity of a man who needs the answer more than he needs to protect himself from the question.
"Dr. Kaur at Pacific Women's, every three weeks." The anger makes me careless and the details spill out in a rush of furious precision—the medical inventory of a woman who has nothing left to hide. "SolaceNatal prenatals, twelve-week scan scheduled for next Thursday."
I catch myself and my mouth snaps shut. I hate—physically, in my teeth—that fury opened a door I meant to keep sealed. "If you want the full inventory of what your lie produced, congratulations. There it is."
"There's something else." I straighten my spine because the next sentence requires architectural support. "I ran a paternity test without telling any of you."
Miles blinks. Blake's chin drops by a fraction—the smallest concession to surprise I've ever seen him make. Spencer's eyes narrow with something that looks dangerously close to dark recognition, the expression of a man who saw this move coming and respected it before he could stop himself.
"I collected your DNA—all three of you—without your knowledge or consent." I let the irony sit between us and watch it cut in every direction. "The results are in a sealed envelope I haven't recieved yet."
"I'm telling you this because I'm done." My nails press crescents into my palms. "Done with secrets—mine and yours. All of them, finished, effective immediately."
The room goes quiet in a way that feels permanent. Four people breathing in a sealed office, afternoon light cutting Spencer's desk in a line that splits the room down the centre. Them and me, and the rubble between us.
"I need space." I stand, and my knees hold—which qualifies as the single victory of this entire afternoon. "Real space. Not the kind where you hover from a slightly larger radius and call it respect."
"How much space?" Miles's voice is raw enough to sand wood. His eyes are bright with something I can't look at directly, the way you can't look at a wound while it's still open.
"Enough to decide whether I can trust three men who made the most intimate decision of my life without asking me." I pick my bag off the floor and settle the strap against my shoulder. "I'll let you know when I have an answer."
I walk to the door. My hand closes around the handle and I wait one breath—not hoping they'll stop me, just registering the quality of the silence behind me. Three men who have never once let me leave a room without a parting word are choosing to let me go.
None of them follow. The corridor stretches ahead, empty, and my heels echo with the hollow precision of a woman walking away from a detonation site.
It's either the first respectful thing they've done all day or the thing that cracks me open—and halfway to the elevator, one hand pressed flat against the wall for balance, I still can't tell which.
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